The amount of information available via computers has dramatically increased with the wide spread proliferation of computer networks, the Internet and digital storage means. With such increased amount of information has come the need to transmit information quickly and to store the information efficiently. Data compression is a technology that facilitates the effective transmitting and storing of information.
Data compression reduces an amount of space necessary to represent information, and can be used for many information types. The demand for compression of digital information, including images, text, audio and video has been ever increasing. Typically, data compression is used with standard computer systems; however, other technologies make use of data compression, such as but not limited to digital and satellite television as well as cellular/digital phones.
As the demand for handling, transmitting and processing large amounts of information increases, the demand for compression of such data increases as well. Although storage device capacity has increased significantly, the demand for information has outpaced capacity advancements. For example, an uncompressed digital picture can require 5 megabytes of space whereas the same picture can be compressed without loss and require only 2.5 megabytes of space. Thus, data compression facilitates transferring larger amounts of information. Even with the increase of transmission rates, such as broadband, DSL, cable modem Internet and the like, transmission limits are easily reached with uncompressed information. For example, transmission of an uncompressed image over a DSL line can take ten minutes. However, the same image can be transmitted in about one minute when compressed thus providing a ten-fold gain in data throughput.
In general, there are two types of compression, lossless and lossy. Lossless compression allows exact original data to be recovered after compression, while lossy compression allows for data recovered after compression to differ from the original data. A tradeoff exists between the two compression modes in that lossy compression provides for a better compression ratio than lossless compression because some degree of data integrity compromise is tolerated. Lossless compression may be used, for example, when compressing critical text, because failure to reconstruct exactly the data can dramatically affect quality and readability of the text. Lossy compression can be used with pictures or non-critical text where a certain amount of distortion or noise is either acceptable or imperceptible to human senses.
Picture compression is a particularly important technical problem, because digital pictures are a significant portion of the information growth referred to previously. Most Web pages today contain many pictures, and many office documents also contain several pictures. The use of digital cameras keeps growing at a fast pace; many users have literally thousands of pictures taken from such cameras.
One of the most popular and widely used techniques of picture compression is the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard. The JPEG standard operates by mapping an 8×8 square block of pixels into the frequency domain by using a discrete cosine transform (DCT). Coefficients obtained by the DCT are divided by a scale factor and rounded to the nearest integer (a process known as quantizing) and then mapped to a one-dimensional vector via a fixed zigzag scan pattern. This one-dimensional vector is encoded using a combination of run-length encoding and Huffman encoding.
Although JPEG is a popular and widely used compression technique, it has several disadvantages. For example, one disadvantage of JPEG is that at low bit rates the DCT produces irregularities and discontinuities in a reconstructed image (known as tiling or blocking artifacts). Blocking artifacts cause the boundary between groups of 8×8 blocks of pixels to become visible in the reconstructed image. These blocking artifacts cause an undesirable degradation in image quality. Another disadvantage of JPEG is that JPEG cannot perform image reconstruction that is progressive in fidelity. In other words, if an image is encoded at a certain fidelity and a lower fidelity is later desired (for example, due to limited bandwidth or storage availability), the image must be decoded and re-encoded.
Some of the disadvantages of JPEG are mitigated by the new JPEG2000, which replaces the DCT by wavelet transforms. Although wavelets provide smooth signal reconstruction without blocking artifacts, they can lead to an increase in blurring and ringing artifacts. Furthermore, JPEG2000 uses a relatively complex coefficient encoding system, resulting in a compression technique that can be 3× (or more) slower than JPEG.